Don't trust it.
Do NOT Take This Cat Home
is a 2023 psychological horror visual novel created by Pixeliminal, about your attempts to adopt an adorable kitten and the various shenanigans you get into while doing so! You wouldn't abandon a cute little kitty, would you...
Do Not Take This Cat Home contains examples of:
- Allegorical Character: The Cat is a living metaphor for abusive and toxic relationships.
- The Aloner: Your protagonist talks a lot about their desperate loneliness and lack of connections. It's this isolation that the Cat uses to prey on you, and if you escape, you start to make friends and even get an actual pet cat.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- With the reveal that most of the game takes part in a Lotus-Eater Machine, the question of just how much of what you've seen is a real representation of the Cat's nature is unclear. Is it actually a nigh-omnipotent Eldritch Abomination, or is it just using illusions to seem like one? It is, after all, an gaslighter and abuser, and you're told repeatedly that it lies.
- Likewise, the Cat's final claim to love you and be motivated by a genuine desire to be your friend. It is all outright lies, or does it genuinely care about you in some fucked-up way? Of note, the Protagonist doesn't bother trying to clarify the situation— whatever the Cat's internal motivations are, it's still an abuser, and you have every right to cut all ties for your own safety.
- Amplified Animal Aptitude: Played for horror. Even before anything blatantly supernatural happens, the Cat is able to understand things like the rules of games, tool usage and complex human emotions, which the protagonist often notes as a sign something's wrong with this cat.
- And I Must Scream: Victims of the Cat are trapped within it, stripped of their bodies and forced to be its eternal playmates. There's no way for them to escape, but they're conspiring to free you. This will destroy the Cat and, with it, them.
- Animalistic Abomination: The Cat appears to be a small cat, but it soon becomes clear there's something very sinister about it. Even when it drops the "cute kitty" facade, it does seem to have some genuine connection to the cat motif, with all of its forms at least vaguely catlike. Even its pitiful final form resembles a horribly mutated cat.
- Antagonist Title: The Cat (who you should not take home) is the main antagonist.
- Armor-Piercing Response: After refusing to believe any of the Cat's claims to love you, it finally hisses that it hates you. When you reply with "That I can believe", it stops talking, with the narration simply noting that there's nothing left to say.
- Big "NO!": The Cat screams one when you finally actively try to escape it.
- Blood Lust: The Cat is eerily obsessed with blood and tries to drink yours when you cut your hand. It retains that hunger throughout the game. Near the endgame you can feed it your blood, causing it to take on a more openly monstrous form.
- Cat/Dog Dichotomy: One of the places you can go to is the dog park. The Cat is not happy about it, causing hallucinations of dog attacks and intrusive thoughts about harming them to make you leave. If you still refuse, the Cat melts all the dogs into one kaiju-sized feral wolf, bars your escape and lets it devour you.
- Cats Are Mean: The Cat is very much not a nice being, and its increasingly unnerving and abusive behavior makes clear that it is no ordinary house cat. Its true form is a sadistic eldritch being taking the form of a cat so it can exploit the protagonist's loneliness and torment them however it wants under the guise of "loving" them back.
- Color Motif: The Cat's black coloration comes up a lot, with unnatural darkness, inky water, shadowy figures and other forms of blackness heralding its presence even when it's not around. Black symbolizes both its true nature as a sadistic, exploitative being and the toxic nature of an extremely abusive relationship as everything the Cat inflicts upon the protagonist is under the excuse of wanting to be loved.
- Content Warnings: A long list is provided in the game file downloads for the players' convenience should they need to watch out for certain triggers.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: The Cat claims that it just wanted to be loved by the protagonist. They point out that they were perfectly willing to love the Cat and let it live in their house up until it repeatedly tortured them to death.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Most of the deaths you get over the game — among other things you can cough up fish until you die, grow fur inside your throat until you suffocate, be trapped in bed until you wither and have your body pulled apart bit by bit.
- Cue the Sun: While the first loop is rainy and miserable, subsequent loops are bright and sunny. You go back to the original rainy loop at the finale, and get a real sunny day after escaping the cat.
- Cute and Psycho: The Cat is very, very cute, and also very, very hellbent on making sure that you'll stay with it. Forever...
- Dark Is Not Evil: At several points in the game, you get eerie messages and images of sinister eyes watching you. They're the Cat's former victims, and are trying to help you escape.
- Deceptively Cute Critter: The Cat is as adorable as it is malicious.
- Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Deconstructed. Turns out being loved by a malicious, reality-warping alien horror isn't a good thing.
- Disproportionate Retribution:
- A self-imposed version — if you choose to feed the Cat, you can offer it chocolate before remembering that chocolate is bad for cats. This causes you to have a mental breakdown with guilt, ending with you accepting your horrifying death, and even in later loops, you are reduced to repeating "I'm sorry" when you see the chocolate bar.
- If you refuse to chant along to the Cat's movie, literally everyone in the world turns against you.
- Dream Apocalypse: When you finally realise what's happening, the dream breaks down completely, reduced to nothing but distorted images and flashes of the Cat's eyes and claws.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The game is explicitly a metaphor for an abusive relationship, with the "Groundhog Day" Loop representing the honeymoon/abuse cycle, and several cryptic messages from previous victims that strongly resemble accounts of grooming. The subtext is basically made text in the finale, with the Cat screaming that it loves you more then anyone and will die without you while furiously attacking you as you try to escape. Even its true final form, a pathetic, impotent blob, is symbolic of the abuser falling apart once the victim decides to fight back and end the cycle of abuse for good.
- Dying Dream: Subverted. The Cat tells you that the events thus far have been your dying dream as it kills you in the first loop, taking you back to that moment so you can finally accept your death. It's lying — it's another dream, and you need to realize this isn't real either to get the Golden Ending.
- Evil Is Petty: As well as trapping you in constant loop of agonizing deaths, the Cat also does things like block your view in the cinema and mess up your freshly-cleaned house.
- Evolving Title Screen: At first the title screen is the cute cat in a cardboard box, with occasional glitches. During the endgame, the cat has glowing white eyes and no other features, and the box is bathed in red light. After the ending, it's the empty box in a sunbeam.
- Faux Affably Evil: When it speaks to you, the Cat is perfectly friendly and pleasant...as long as you don't defy it in any way.
- Featureless Protagonist: The most we see of the protagonist is their arms — we do see replicas of them in the mirror maze, but they're so distorted that they don't provide much information.
- Foreshadowing: When you play with the Cat, it quickly becomes aggressive, and then violent, when it starts losing. Likewise, if you take options that don't directly involve the Cat, it becomes openly crueler. Like all abusers, it can't stand not being in control, or you having a life outside of it.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: During its more sinister moments, the Cat's eye's turn into blank, glowing yellow orbs.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Every time you die, you return to the alleyway with the Cat. You don't consciously remember what's going on, but you get hints regarding what happened before, and each ending causes more awareness to seep through.
- Hates Being Alone: The Cat will get very angry if you leave it alone.
- Heroic Willpower: How you defeat the Cat, taking control of the dream and reshaping it with your own will.
- Ironic Hell: Whatever you do, the horrors are in some way based on it — take an Instagram photo and your phone turns evil, feed the Cat tuna and you get attacked by unnatural fish, watch a jumpscare-filled horror movie and you get shown horrifying images until your heart gives out. This is because the Cat is drawing on your subconscious to form the dream world. It even thanks you for providing such rich inspiration.
- It Can Think: Right from the start, the Cat shows signs of eerie intelligence, seemingly understanding what you're saying and "accidentally" using tools. In the final loop, it drops the facade completely, pleasantly speaking to you in perfect English.
- "It" Is Dehumanizing: A slightly odd example. given the Cat is referred to with it pronouns anyway (what with being, well, a cat). Still, once its true nature is revealed, it's referred to only as "It", seemingly to distance it from actual cats.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: The Cat claims a very dark version of this. It wants to have friends... under its complete control, and as playthings for its sadistic whims. In the end, you can tell it that whatever love it has is fucked up and monstrous, and isolation it has is due to it hurting everyone who comes near it.
- The Many Deaths of You: Every path except the Golden Ending ultimately leads to a different, nightmarish death. You need to get through 37 at minimum.
- Master of Illusion: Most of the events of the game (and maybe all of the events of the game) are a dream you've been trapped in by the Cat.
- Meaningful Rename: The Cat is only referred to as, well, the Cat for most of the game. Once you find out what's really going on the narration and game screen both change to simply using "It".
- Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: The narration very often gets weird, bringing up past events, mocking you, or flashing to the Cat's perspective. This is because the narration is the Cat, shaping the dream you're trapped in.
- Multiple-Choice Past: If you ask the Cat where it came from, it dodges the question. It might be a demon, a god, an alien...or maybe all cats can do this. Either way, it doesn't care — it considers what it can do more important.
- Multiple Endings: As well as the many endings where you die horribly, there's three final endings and one unofficial ending.
- Nyat a Fool: You just don't take the Cat home in the first place, avoiding the entire plot.
- F O R E V E R: You agree to stay with the Cat forever, being another of its many victims.
- Another Day: You take control of the dream, cut off the Cat's power, and start to rebuild your life and recover from its abuse.
- ... : As above, but you return to the Cat, willingly returning yourself to its dream.
- No Body Left Behind: The Cat's first "death" leaves behind a bloody corpse, which quickly reanimates. In contrast, when you actually kill the Cat, its body just fades into nothing, leaving behind only its empty box.
- One-Winged Angel: At various points, the Cat takes on monstrous forms, ranging from simply a panther-like big cat to giant monsters, walls of flesh and tentacled abominations. Once you strip away all its illusions, you see its true form as an impotent Blob Monster.
- Powering Villain Realization: Your relationship with the Cat is what's granting it power. If you manage to take control of the dream and cut ties with it, it goes from an unstoppable Reality Warper to a powerless blob monster.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: At the end you give the Cat a very cathartic one, telling it that it's a monster who hurts and abuses people, that it could have formed healthy relationships if it really wanted companionship, and that everything that happened to it is entirely its fault.
- Surreal Horror: The game has a very dream-logic feel — buy a doll and become a doll, take a photo and find something that cannot be seen, feed the cat meatloaf and see meat swallow your house. It all kind of makes sense, in a symbolic way, but the exact reasoning is unclear at best. This is, of course, because it is a dream.
- This Was His True Form: The Brought Down to Normal variant: after you strip it of its power and escape its illusion, the Cat is revealed as nothing but a pile of immobile goo before it dies, unable to do anything but tearfully beg you to stay.
- Unreliable Expositor: The Cat is a gaslighting, deceitful Master of Illusion, so it's unclear how much any of its already unclear exposition about its nature and origins is honest.
- Villainous Breakdown: When you realize that the Cat's entire realm is a dream and you can take control of it, it loses its mind, screaming that only it will ever love you and you're betraying its kindness and generosity. After you actually escape, it's reduced even further, to an impotent pile of slime pathetically begging you not to leave it.
- Yandere: The Cat loves you, like it loved all its prey. It will not let you escape to be loved by anyone else.
